UK card payment fees usually come in four parts: a transaction percentage on each sale, an interchange fee set by the card schemes that sits inside it, any fixed monthly rental or software charge, and one-off costs such as the terminal itself. Pay-as-you-go providers fold most of this into one simple rate; contract acquirers split it out, which can be cheaper at volume but harder to read. The UK regulator caps some interchange fees but found small businesses often overpay by not shopping around. Compare the UK panel in your language at Operatori de plăți în UK.
If your first business language is Polish or Romanian, UK card fee tables can read like a wall of jargon written to confuse you. They often are. This guide breaks down what you are actually paying for, so you can compare two quotes honestly. For the basics of the hardware itself, see what is a card machine.
What are the different types of card fee?
There are four layers. A good provider will be able to show you all four.
- The transaction fee. A percentage of each sale, sometimes plus a few pence. This is the headline number you will see advertised, for example “1.69% per transaction”.
- Interchange. A fee the card schemes (Visa, Mastercard) pass to the card-issuing bank. It is built into your transaction fee, not a separate line, but it is the floor your provider cannot go below.
- Fixed costs. Monthly terminal rental, software or “service” charges, and sometimes a minimum monthly fee. Pay-as-you-go readers usually have none of these; contract acquirers usually do.
- One-off costs. The price of the terminal, setup or “PCI compliance” admin fees. Watch for these in contract quotes.
What is interchange, and is it capped?
Interchange is the wholesale part of the fee. In the UK, consumer debit and credit card interchange is capped: broadly 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit on standard domestic consumer cards, the levels carried over from the EU Interchange Fee Regulation. The Payment Systems Regulator has been working to hold cross-border consumer card interchange to those same 0.2% and 0.3% levels after fees rose post-Brexit (Payment Systems Regulator, cross-border interchange review).
Why this matters to you: interchange is the part nobody can discount away. So when one provider quotes a much lower headline rate than another, the difference is in their margin and fixed costs, not interchange. That is the part worth negotiating.
What does this cost a typical small business?
It depends entirely on your card turnover and mix. As context, UK cards handled 31.4 billion transactions worth just over one trillion pounds in 2024, with an average contactless transaction of £15.86 (UK Finance, 2025). For a small shop taking mostly small contactless payments, the per-transaction percentage matters more than monthly rental; for a business with fewer, larger payments, a fixed monthly cost spreads more thinly.
The practical test is to take your own expected monthly takings and run them through each quote. A 0.3% difference in rate is worth £30 a month on £10,000 of card sales, or £360 a year.
Why do migrant-owned businesses often overpay?
Two reasons, and neither is your fault.
First, the market is genuinely hard to compare. The UK regulator found that card-acquiring services do not work well for small and medium businesses, and that many rarely search for a better provider or switch, even though they could save by doing so (Payment Systems Regulator, 2021).
Second, the comparison information is almost all in English. Polish and Romanian are among the most common non-UK nationalities in England and Wales, with around 760,000 Polish and 550,000 Romanian passport holders recorded at the 2021 Census (Office for National Statistics, 2022). That is a large number of business owners being asked to choose a financial product through a second-language fee table. It is easy to accept a worse deal simply because reading the contract is exhausting.
How do I avoid the common fee traps?
A short checklist before you sign anything:
- Get the all-in cost, not just the headline rate. Ask for transaction fee plus every monthly and one-off charge in one figure.
- Check the contract length and early-exit fee. A cheap rate locked into a multi-year contract with a high exit penalty is not cheap.
- Watch “free terminal” offers. A free machine is often paid for through a higher transaction rate or a longer lock-in.
- Confirm settlement timing. Next-day settlement helps cash flow; some providers hold funds longer.
- Get more than one quote. This is the single biggest lever you have.
Kartapay compares the UK-licensed panel and explains the numbers in your language, in Polish and Romanian, so you can read the contract properly before you commit. For Romanian-language provider comparisons start at Romanian-speaking card machine for UK businesses. We are an independent comparison and introducer service, not a payment provider, so we have no interest in steering you to a higher fee.